Manufacturing enterprises produce products to be delivered to customers, based on various needs, such as, customer orders, customer demands, or customer requests. For example, a customer order may require delivery of a particular quantity of a product by a particular date. However, manufacturing enterprises have various manufacturing constraints, such as, for example, capacity constraints and material constraints that may not allow a manufacturing enterprise to fulfill every customer order. That is, some customer orders may not receive any promises, while other customer orders may only receive inadequate promises. This inability to make promises to fulfill customer orders is undesirable.
In an effort to overcome the above-discussed deficiencies, manufacturing enterprises have tried to reserve products in an attempt to provide differentiated service levels to customers during the order promise and fulfillment process. However, these reservations are typically based on forecasts that become inaccurate due to various inadequacies with the forecasts. In addition, because these forecasts are often inaccurate, customer orders are either not promised, when they could have been or are promised but are not fulfilled. This inability to accurately make promises and fulfill customer orders is also undesirable.